Gallery shows

Gallery shows

Bettina Blohm and Don Voisine: Affect as subject

Contributed by Adam Simon / Two galleries with a focus on abstract painting, a short walk from each other in downtown Manhattan, currently have exhibitions that share a vocabulary of basic geometric forms, directional brushwork, and an emphasis on color relationships. Both shows present the rectangle as a primary condition of most painting and the dynamic interplay of forms within the rectangle as a drama unfolding. Yet these two shows couldn’t be more different. Seeing one after the other, as I did, was a study of how affect itself, manifested through color choices and paint application, becomes a subject for abstract painting, analogous to but different from a subject for representational painting.

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Gallery shows

Meg Lipke and Jeff Williams: Enchantment without sublimation

Contributed by Ben Godward / Meg Lipke and Jeff Williams seem to dance through the fledgling Roundabouts Now Gallery – once a medical office conference room in an industrial park – in Kingston, New York. The central collaboration comprises a large sewn and stuffed canvas with ruin-like drawings enveloping three deliciously odd sculptural objects. This union casts a pervasive spell. Pushing the interior accretion forms further into the unreal are surfaces that appear to be made of dust or remnants of ashes. Spectral in their essence but protected in the upholstered pool, they look as if they could dissolve into a pile if touched. 

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Gallery shows

A tight three at Field of Play

Contributed by Michael Brennan / “A creative economy is the fuel of magnificence,” said Ralph Waldo Emerson in another context. As much as I respect institutional Minimalism, economy in painting excites me more, and what could be more economical than a three-person, three-painting exhibition presented in a 135-square-foot space with one empty wall? Artist Mark Sengbusch has scrupulously curated “3 Painters” at Field of Play in Gowanus in accord with his own personal Periodic Table, in which each artist represents a specific Element. Charlotte Hallberg is field, Clare Grill is air, and Victoria Roth is depth.

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Gallery shows

The FLAG Art Foundation contemplates the meaning of “rose”

Contributed by Almog Cohen-Kashi / A rose has never had a fixed meaning. This simple flower swings between adoration and destruction, purity and rot, natural beauty and artificial symbolism. Seamlessly interlacing art history and literature, “A Rose Is” at the FLAG Art Foundation brings together 39 artists of varying generations and backgrounds for a poetic exploration of how society views an idealized plant to project shifting attitudes towards love, romance, commercialism, commemoration, and decay in an elegantly curated exhibition….

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Gallery shows

“Hyper-meme” at Living Skin: Immaculately funny

Contributed by Will Maddoxx / On Valentine’s Day, I walked into Living Skin, a “project space and persons hub” in Bushwick that had piqued my interest when I read its manifesto and perused promotional images for the group show “Hyper-meme.” I came to the show with some hesitation, as I have been to countless group shows that seemed unfocused and vague. Smatterings of “work about histories of images” or “art of a contemporary landscape” have gotten old and deflating. “Hyper-meme,” however, is sharp, original, and hyper-specific. It blew me away.

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Gallery shows

Fairyland 2: Enchanted tasks and tales of wonder

Contributed by Kari Adelaide Razdow / Lassoing whimsy and venturing into uncanny realms where crimson eyes peer from stones, “Fairyland 2: Deeper, Darker” at Mindy Solomon Gallery in Miami, curated by Valerie Hegarty, presents a captivating visual language of non-human elementals and imaginings. Fairies, as an archetype, are perennially underestimated. Nimble and powerful in their capacity to provoke enchantment, they idiosyncratically neutralize assumptions through glamour, illusion, and surprise, and collapse boundaries of knowing and unknowing, and visibility and invisibility. In this group show, various paintings portray animals – one has bats emerging from petrified stage curtains in the forest – but figuration dominates. Bodies on the ground or bending towards the earth suggest unknown struggles, pixie-led crossings, enchanted tasks, and tales of wonder. Hybrid creatures, including Mala Iqbal’s painting Forest Tangle with Jaybird, align with Leonora Carrington’s surreal chimerical figures, including Figuras Miticas: Bailarin II and Girl, Horse, Tree, now on view in “Leonora Carrington: Dream Weaver” at the Rose Art Museum.  

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Conversation Gallery shows

Drew Shiflett and Carter Hodgkin on the creative process

Contributed by Riad Miah / In conjunction with their two-person exhibition, The Shape of Things, at the John Molloy Gallery, I had the opportunity to engage in a conversation with artists Drew Shiflett and Carter Hodgkin about their materials and unusual creative processes. At first, their pairing seemed unexpected, as their visual languages appeared quite distinct. However, after seeing the exhibition firsthand, I came to appreciate the deep connections and underlying commonalities in their work.

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Gallery shows

A group apart at Springs Projects

Contributed by Jonathan Stevenson / There are a fair few viable organizing concepts for group art exhibitions. One particularly challenging one is to present viewers with a tour d’horizon of emotions and attitudes that seem to prevail at a given historical moment. The key to optimal execution, of course, is to avoid both the obvious and the obscure. In “Each Own” at Springs Projects, curators and gallery co-founders Cate Holt and Tommy White strike the right balance, strategically deploying the work of six exceptional…

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Gallery shows

Michael Handley, Greg Lindquist: Chemistry and fire

Contributed by Katy Crowe / Michael Handley and Greg Lindquist’s show at the Landing Gallery – identified by the emoji for fire – could not have been more poignantly timed. It coincides with California’s fire season and more particularly the destructive Mountain Fire just north of Los Angeles, beyond that with drought-induced fires on the east coast, including Brooklyn’s Prospect Park, and with an incendiary presidential election.

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Gallery shows

Lydia Baker: Pooling consciousness

Contributed by Jacob Patrick Brooks / It would be hard to miss the overarching theme of Lydia Baker’s show “Sonnet,” up at Massey Klein Gallery: metamorphosis. But rather than relying on overused signifiers, she gently guides us through life’s whitewater rapids, her work practically whispering “the only constant is change.”

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Gallery shows

Black and blacker at Studio 10

Contributed by Elizabeth Johnson / Planned with hope and trepidation, “In the Dark,” now up at Studio 10, leans into post-election malaise and dread with work by Mike Ballou, Tom Butter, Larry Greenberg, David Henderson, and Kate Teale – Brooklyn-based artists whose studio explorations are unified through the color black, via shape, mood, and phenomenon. Designed as a positive project for unsettled times, the exhibit coheres as a short list of nascent strategies for coping with darkness writ large before it has been parsed, studied, and conclusively judged. The works share a resistant sense of seduction, anticipation, and opportunity. By virtue of piecemeal construction, the show sustains an alluring in-between emotion, just right for entering voids that are only partly plumbed or viewing objects that are but partly known. 

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Gallery shows

Aggregate: The city as nature

Contributed by Anna Gregor / The anxiety of being unable to distinguish artifice from nature has haunted art since the Ancient Greeks. No one wants to be the prisoner who mistakes the shadow on the cave wall for Truth, or, more embarrassingly, the bird who tries to eat the grapes in Zeuxis’s trompe l’oeil still life. But today, as human-made technology permeates all aspects of life, the difference between what is artificial and what is real is not so clear. This ambiguity is most apparent in the city, where nature manifests itself as a force of decomposition and aggregation that acts on all objects indiscriminately, whether “natural” or human-made. Here, art and nature are indistinguishable. This relation of artifice and nature in the city is the driving force behind “Aggregate,” now up at Studio 9D.

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Gallery shows

Unsung galleries: Notes from a walkabout

Contributed by Michael Brennan / A while ago, with a half dozen adventurous galleries operating, a new art corridor seemed to be emerging on Atlantic Avenue in Brooklyn. This made geographical sense. Brooklyn was reaching critical mass in terms of artist residents, and the street itself was long and central, with excellent public transportation access…

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